Clifford Geertz: Singular Genius of Interpretive Anthropology

Legacies

Clifford Geertz: Singular Genius of Interpretive
Anthropology

Ben White

INTRODUCTION

Clifford Geertz (1926–2006), the foremost anthropologist of his generation,
was a key figure in the interpretive turn in the social sciences and the re-
thinking of boundaries between the social sciences and humanities. In 1970,
he became the first professor in the new School of Social Sciences at the
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he created ‘a school of
interpretive social science’,1 and devoted himself almost full-time to research
and writing for the next thirty-six years. In anthropology, after a period
of virtual saturation up to the mid-1980s, his intellectual influence began
to wane, but his influence over other disciplines has lasted much longer
(Vincent, 1990: 426).
   What was the basis of his influence, and what has he left behind? Geertz
was a paradoxical scholar in many ways. He drew his inspiration not from
the great traditions of anthropology or sociology (with the exception of Max
Weber) but from mid-twentieth century linguistic philosophy and literary crit-
icism, creatively transposing these ideas to his own work.2 A master at draw-
ing profound implications from an ethnographic detail, his ethnographic work
on Java, Bali and Morocco was criticized as carelessly researched and prone
to too-casual generalization. His three major works on Indonesian social
history were all completed without once setting foot in an archive. Distrust-
ful of all grand schemes and theories, he placed his first five books firmly in
the frame of modernization theory, development studies’ grandest evolution-
ary scheme of all. Awkward in person and in speech — ‘a fidgety, scratchy,

For comments, encouragement and pointers to references many thanks to Martin van Bruinessen,
Martin Doornbos, Linda Herrera, Frans Hüsken, John Roosa, Ratna Saptari, Henk Schulte,
Nordholt Pujo Semedi, Ann Stoler, Robert Wessing and the editorial board of Development and
Change. Spelling of Indonesian words in pre-1973 quotations has been changed to current usage.

1.   Geertz, interviewed in Handler (1991: 610)
2.   In particular, Gilbert Ryle and Ludwig Wittgenstein among the philosophers, and Kenneth
     Burke in the ‘new’ literary criticism.
Development and Change 38(6): 1187–1208 (2007). 
                                                C Institute of Social Studies 2007. Published

by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St.,
Malden, MA 02148, USA

1188                                                                            Ben White

given-to-mumbling sort of guy’ 3 — he developed a distinctive, flamboyant
writing style more self-consciously erudite than that of any other anthro-
pologist. In fact the main source of his intellectual influence was not his
ethnographic or historical work but his consummate skill as an essayist, es-
pecially in the three volumes of what he called ‘ethnographically informed
reflections’ (Geertz 1973, 1983, 2000a). The first of these, The Interpreta-
tion of Cultures (1973) is widely seen as marking a major paradigm shift, a
Geertzian revolution in the theorization of the concept of culture.
   Geertz wrote on a wide range of topics, and any account of his work and
legacy must be selective. I have chosen a more or less chronological treatment.
After a short account of his early career, this assessment focuses first on his
early work on Indonesian religion, politics and agrarian change, next on his
general vision on the nature of culture and ethnography, and finally asks
some critical questions on the Geertzian vision of culture, politics and social
change.

BEGINNINGS: FUNCTIONALISM AND MODERNIZATION THEORY

It is important to recall the timing and intellectual and political context of
Geertz’s formative years, which shaped and constrained his early writing
and to which, eventually, he was bound to react. Post-war north American
social science, especially as it concerned the study of the ‘new [post-colonial]
states’, was driven, and generously funded, by Cold War concerns and anx-
ieties. It was positivistic and functionalist in orientation, and its main theo-
retical underpinning was modernization theory.
   Farmed out by his divorced parents, from the age of three, to a foster
mother in the northern California hills, Geertz went to a two-room school
in the depths of the Great Depression. He became an anthropologist and
an Indonesia specialist through a succession of happenstances. Enlisting at
age seventeen in the US Navy (1943–46), his four years of service gave
him access, like so many other young men of his generation, to a GI Bill-
funded college education. 4 He read literature, linguistics and philosophy at
Antioch College, and drew inspiration particularly from the ‘New Criticism’
of Kenneth Burke. At first he thought that he would like to be a novelist
and a newspaper man, but on graduation he drifted into anthropology with
his wife Hildred (who was to become a distinguished anthropologist in her
own right). He was lured away from philosophy by his own teachers, 5 and

3. In the words of David Apter, a close friend since the late 1940s (Apter, 2007: 111).
4. Roosevelt’s (1944) GI Bill of Rights gave some eight million Second World War veterans
   access to job training or higher education, and was covering the costs of half the nation’s
   expanding college student population by 1947 (Branch, 2007: 40).
5. Thomas Geiger, the disenchanted Deweyite philosopher — ‘the greatest teacher I have ever
   known’ — warned him that philosophy had fallen into the hands of ‘Thomists, technicians
   and . . . the University of Chicago’ (Geertz, 2000c: 53).

Legacies: Clifford Geertz                                                                 1189

into anthropology by a long meeting with Margaret Mead which convinced
the Geertzes to accept the offer of graduate fellowships at Harvard’s new
‘Department of Social Relations’. Established by Talcott Parsons, the con-
servative, neo-Weberian structural functionalist sociologist, the Department
aimed to further Parson’s vision of an integrated, interdisciplinary social
science.
   Among Geertz’s eminent teachers was anthropologist and Russia-watcher
Clyde Kluckhohn, the ‘driven, imperious . . . fierce controversialist, player
of favourites, and master money-raiser’ (Geertz, 2002: 4), who involved
Geertz in many of his projects. One of these projects plunged him into the
heart of anthropology’s most contested problematic, ‘culture’, when he was
assigned to study and comment on the draft of Kluckhohn’s and Alfred
Kroeber’s Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions, which
aimed at a definitive compilation of all the prevailing definitions of ‘culture’,
finding 171 definitions and sorting them into thirteen categories. 6 This dry,
inductive exercise must have helped to sow the seeds of his distaste for the
vague, all-embracing definition of culture (‘anything human beings might
contrive to do, say, imagine, be, or believe’) that held sway in North American
anthropology, and his later determination ‘to cut the idea of culture down to
size’ (Geertz, 2000b: 12, 13).
   As the time for field research approached, Geertz had no special regional
interest or preference. Through Kluckhohn’s influence in the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology’s new Centre for International Studies (Cenis), both
Clifford and Hildred Geertz were invited to join MIT’s new Indonesia Project.
In 1952 this project sent the Geertzes and four other Harvard PhD candidates 7
to Indonesia’s young, revolutionary Gadjah Mada University under an agree-
ment by which they would undertake joint research, each paired with an In-
donesian graduate student, in the Central Javanese hill-town of Wonosobo.
Not long after their arrival the MIT team left, without their Indonesian coun-
terparts, to carry out field research in and around the East Javanese town of
‘Mojokuto’ 8 and the research co-operation with Gadjah Mada fell through.
Accounts of this breakdown — the first in a long series of troubled relations
between foreign PhD researchers and their Indonesian hosts — are diver-
gent. Both Koentjaraningrat (1975: 223) and Geertz (interviewed in 1988
and 1991) note the Indonesian professors’ disappointment and suspicion as
they found themselves hosts to a leaderless group of American graduate
students in what had been negotiated as a much higher-level, professor-to-
professor collaboration (Geertz, 1988b: 33–4; and in Olson, 1991: 605). 9 The

6. Geertz (2000a: 12), referring to Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952)
7. Alice Dewey, Donald Fagg, Robert Jay and Edward Ryan.
8. Literally ‘Middletown’, the sub-district capital Pare in the heart of the important sugarcane
   producing region of Kediri, East Java.
9. At the last minute the team leader Professor Douglas Oliver had decided not to join the
   team.

1190                                                                 Ben White

Americans were also alarmed at the large numbers of Indonesian students
who planned to join them in fieldwork (Geertz, 1995: 105). Later Geertz laid
the blame for the breakdown on the Indonesian professors, who apparently
insisted that the American and Indonesian students’ fieldwork be conducted
from the comfort of an old Dutch resort hotel; local officials would summon
people from the surrounding countryside to the hotel to be interviewed in
groups, in an ‘extraordinary reincarnation of the pith-helmet procedures of
colonial ethnology’ (ibid.). But he also recalls that at the time, ‘an armed
gang of leftist rebels controlled much of the countryside’ around Wonosobo
(ibid.: 106), which helps to explain the Gadjah Mada professors’ reluctance
to let their young American guests loose there. Wherever ‘truth’ lies (some-
where in between the various accounts, perhaps) it is the later ‘pith-helmet’
version which will stick, now adopted and further exaggerated by Geertz’s
intellectual biographer (Inglis, 2000: 3–14).
   Under its Director Max Millikan (previously the CIA’s Director of Eco-
nomic Research), Cenis aimed at ‘the production of an alternative to Marx-
ism’ (Rosen, 1985: 29). Other core staff included Walt Rostow, who was
busy writing The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-communist Manifesto
(Rostow, 1960). Kluckhohn, who had brokered the Ford Foundation funding
for the Indonesia project, was himself an important conduit for CIA area
studies funds (Ross, 1998). The Indonesia project as a whole was intended to
explore a ‘common thesis’ on the contexts and conditions of Rostovian ‘take-
off’ into economic growth, summarized in the words of the project director:
‘A “take-off” is most likely when the growth of an indigenous entrepreneurial
class occurs simultaneously with the appearance of a political elite which has
the power and the will to provide a policy framework favourable for the exer-
cise of entrepreneurial talents’ (Higgins, 1963: ix). Geertz’s task in the team,
to study ‘Javanese religion’, was also conceived in relation to this broader
scenario of the entrepreneurial roots of economic growth; his thesis proposal
was ‘a test of the Weberian hypothesis, that the strongly Muslim sector would
be the functional equivalent of the Protestants in the Reformation’ (Geertz
in Handler, 1991: 605).
   In Mojokuto, the Geertzes lived in the house of a railroad worker on the
fringe of town, spending their time mainly in extended interviews with key
informants and participant observation. Returning to Cambridge, Geertz was
offered a research position at Cenis where he embarked on a great rush of writ-
ing on a wide range of topics, overlapping considerably with those assigned
to his fellow Mojokuto team members. In 1956, besides completing his 700-
page thesis on the religion of Java, Geertz produced two book-length mono-
graphs for the project: The Development of the Javanese Economy: A Socio-
Cultural Approach (Geertz, 1956a) and The Social Context of Economic
Change: An Indonesian Case Study, a social history of Mojokuto (Geertz,
1956b). These monographs attracted little attention at the time, but most of
Geertz’s many publications in the following decade can be seen as the work-
ing out, topic by topic, of ideas first sketched out in them (Smail, 1965).

Legacies: Clifford Geertz                                                                   1191

   New fieldwork in Bali (1958) was followed by a teaching job at Berkeley
and a year at Stanford’s Centre for Advanced Studies. Among the fellows
at Stanford, Edward Shils and David Apter from the University of Chicago
persuaded Geertz to join them in the new ‘Committee for the Comparative
Study of New Nations’, which also sponsored a teaching appointment. In the
next decade at Chicago, Geertz produced a flood of landmark publications.
Besides numerous articles and chapters on Indonesian religion and rural
society, six books emerged in eight years: The Religion of Java (Geertz,
1960), Agricultural Involution (Geertz, 1963a), Peddlers and Princes
(Geertz, 1963b), Old Societies and New States (Geertz, 1963c), The So-
cial History of an Indonesian Town (Geertz, 1965), and (after new fieldwork
in Morocco in 1963) Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco
and Indonesia (Geertz, 1968). By the mid-1960s it had become impossible
to discuss almost any aspect of Indonesian society, or more general debates
on Third World religion or politics, without reference to Geertz’s work.

GEERTZ IN JAVA: RELIGION AND AGRARIAN CHANGE

Geertz’s best-known books on Indonesia are The Religion of Java (1960),
Agricultural Involution (1963a) and Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-
Century Bali (1980). 10 The Religion of Java 11 is the first, masterly exemplar
of the classic Geertzian style which so many subsequent generations of an-
thropologists have imitated. The book has no clear objectives and makes no
effort to locate itself in relation to previous scholarship or ongoing debates
on Indonesian society, or on Islam. 12 It is simply an extraordinary, read-
able and powerful work of descriptive ethnography. The informants ‘speak
for themselves’ (or an eye-witness account of an event is described by the
ethnographer), and the ethnographer often appears himself, something which
earlier generations of anthropologists might not consider quite proper, as the
material is relayed verbatim in the standard Geertzian indented excerpts from
field notes, as in the following example

   I talked to Joyo on the corner the other night about his marvelous grandfather . . . He said his
   grandfather was able to disappear magically. Also he could go great distances in a short time.
   He would walk out of the house and announce to his wife that he was going to Semarang
   [three or four hundred miles away] and in fifteen minutes he would walk back in . . . His

10. Peddlers and Princes (1963b), a comparative study of entrepreneurship cast in the language
    of modernization and ‘take-off’ theory, has not stood the test of time; The Social History of
    an Indonesian Town (1965), in my view one of Geertz’s best-written books, attracted little
    notice outside of Indonesian studies.
11. The book is a largely unrevised version of Geertz’s 1956 PhD thesis (supervised by Cora
    Dubois), minus the introductory and concluding chapters.
12. The book has literally less than two dozen citations and no bibliography, and makes only
    passing reference to a few previous studies on Indonesian society and two general works on
    ‘Mohamedanism’.

1192                                                                              Ben White

  grandfather was arrested once by the Dutch and taken to Bragang and put into jail because
  of his ilmu [science] — all his pupils walking along behind him as he was led in. When they
  returned home, they found him there in the house ready to teach, and it turned out that he was
  in both places at once . . . (Geertz, 1960: 89)

   Joyo’s tall tale, relayed neutrally in simple prose and without further com-
ment or interpretation, is ‘admitted, not as a curiosity, but as something that
reasonably passes between two persons’ (Siegel, 1995: 94); ‘I talked to Joyo
on the corner the other night’ places the reader right there, listening to Joyo
over Geertz’s shoulder, and invited to reflect on what he says, making the
overall effect of the episode unforgettable (Anderson, 1995: 20). This ‘being
there’ approach to field research and writing is a source of the great evoca-
tive power of Geertz’s work, but also of some of its weaknesses. As critics
were quick to note, The Religion of Java embodied quite serious problems
in Geertz’s depiction of the Javanese social world, and the place of Islam in
that world.
   In this and other works, Geertz distinguished three main aliran (‘streams’)
or ‘cultural types which reflect the organization of Javanese culture’: the
santri (orthodox, modernist), abangan (Javanist, syncretist) and priyayi (In-
dic, Hindu-Buddhist) varieties of Javanese Islam (Geertz, 1960: 4). This
tripartite horizontal social cleavage is put forward with typical Geertzian
panache, as ‘too apparent to be missed by even the most positivist sociolo-
gist’ (Geertz, 1965: 124). Both Indonesian and foreign scholars were quick
to point to Geertz’s conflation of horizontal (religious orientation and world
view) and vertical (social class) axes of social distinction, both of which are
equally important in Javanese society, and which do not coincide but cut
across each other; priyayi refers to a distinction of social class (opposed to
wong cilik or common people) rather than of religious culture, and priyayi
may be either orthodox or syncretist Muslims (Cruikshank, 1972; Bachtiar,
1973; Hefner, 1987; Koentjaraningrat, 1960). This is an early example of
the reluctance to recognize the importance of distinctions of class and power
which runs like a red thread through Geertz’s work.
   Geertz’s determination to explore ‘everyday Islam’ through ethnographic
study of the practices through which ordinary Muslims experienced their
religion (Hefner, 1999: 14), was a healthy reaction to prevailing Orientalist
traditions of historical and literary (textual) scholarship on Islam. However,
Geertz seems to have accepted uncritically his modernist santri informants’
narrow views of what is really Islamic, dismissing the religious practices of
abangan and priyayi as ‘Hindu-Buddhist’ and un-Islamic. He thus embraced,
perhaps unwittingly, an updated version of colonialism’s comfortable, Ori-
entalist vision of Islam as a thin, late-deposited cultural ‘veneer’ floating
loosely on the bedrock of ‘real’ eastern culture, and in this way contributed
to the relative marginalization of Islam in Indonesian (and more generally
Southeast Asian) studies, which later scholarship has had to redress (Hefner,
1999: 11–16).

Legacies: Clifford Geertz                                                               1193

   Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indone-
sia (1963a) set the agenda for much subsequent research on social change in
rural Java for the next two decades. The book is not directly based on field
research — research findings from ‘Mojokuto’ or other locations are not
referred to at all — but on a few, mainly Dutch, publications on Indonesian
colonial history. Using statistics from 1920 to show a positive relation be-
tween sugarcane production, population density and per-hectare rice yields,
and ‘doing history backwards’ to ‘figure out how the situation characteristic
of this later period could have been produced’ (Geertz, 1963a: 70), Geertz
argued that the Javanese response to colonial pressures on production and
population growth had consisted of a combination of labour intensification in
subsistence production, and increased complexity on both the technical and
the social side of agriculture. Geertz invoked the concept of involution, ‘the
overdriving of an established form in such a way that it becomes rigid through
an inward overelaboration of detail’ (ibid.: 82) 13 (contrasted, therefore, with
‘evolutionary’ or developmental patterns of change) to depict the cultural
response of Java and other regions of ‘inner Indonesia’ to Dutch colonial
policies, made possible by their ecological setting. Irrigated rice terraces,
he argued, can respond to labour intensification almost indefinitely without
loss of soil fertility, but with only stable or declining per capita output, and
this allowed a symbiotic rotation of the main export and subsistence crops
(sugarcane and paddy) from the early nineteenth century until Indonesian
independence and beyond.
   Agricultural change thus consisted mainly of involutionary ‘technical hair-
splitting and unending virtuosity’ in ‘pregermination, transplantation, more
thorough land preparation, fastidious planting and weeding, razor-blade har-
vesting, double-cropping, a more exact regulation of terrace flooding, and the
addition of more fields at the edge of volcanoes’ (ibid.: 77–8). The hallmark
of Java’s involuted rural society of the 1950s was a relative social-economic
homogeneity of village communities, encapsulated in the phrase ‘shared
poverty’, 14 achieved by ‘dividing the economic pie into a steadily increasing
number of minute pieces’ through the elaboration of traditional land-tenure
and labour relations, ‘mechanisms through which the agricultural product
was spread, if not altogether evenly, at least relatively so, throughout the
huge human horde which was obliged to subsist on it’ (ibid.: 97); this elabo-
ration being ‘matched and supported by a similar involution in rural family
life, social stratification, political organization, religious practice, as well

13. The term ‘involution’ is borrowed from Kroeber’s student Alexander Goldenweiser (1936)
    who had applied it in the 1930s to Maori woodcarving.
14. Geertz claimed his use of the term ‘shared poverty’ was an allusion to Winston Churchill’s
    characterization of communism (Geertz, 1984: 527), though many have considered it more
    likely borrowed from Boeke.

1194                                                                                    Ben White

as the “folk-culture” value system . . . in terms of which it was normatively
regulated and ethically justified’ (ibid.: 101–2). 15
   Agricultural involution acts against development, threatening for example
to incorporate any productivity changes through technical change into fur-
ther stagnation ‘in the absence of any genuine reconstruction of Indonesian
civilization’ (ibid.: 146). This ‘reconstruction’ would require the breaking
down of involutionary constraints to the emergence of ‘a modern, commercial
farming community’ (ibid.: 90), or as Geertz explained in the Social History
of an Indonesian Town: ‘one of Java’s greatest needs: a “virile yeomanry”’
(Geertz, 1965: 49).
   Subsequent, detailed research by social historians, anthropologists and oth-
ers has undermined almost every argument in the involution thesis, leaving
it as ‘a brilliant hypothesis, brought down by available evidence’ (Brown,
1997: 110). These criticisms questioned both involution’s supposed ecolog-
ical basis (for example, ecological mutuality of sugarcane and rice) and its
economic and social features (labour-intensification, and ‘shared poverty’).
As Wertheim remarked, Geertz’s vision mirrored the blindness of colonial and
post-colonial élites, whose idea of the harmonious and homogeneous village
community was derived from, and promoted by, the village élite themselves
(Wertheim, 1975: 177–214; cf. Utrecht, 1973: 40). There is certainly a strik-
ing lack of fit between Geertz’s accounts of Javanese homogeneous rural and
small-town culture and the many violent political conflicts in the region both
before and after his fieldwork. Many of the critics (including this author) had
originally admired and even been inspired by his work; but they emerged from
fieldwork (or, in the case of the social/economic historians, from the colonial
archives of The Hague or Jakarta) with an empirically grounded reading of
Javanese society which they simply could not find in the pages of Geertz’s
book. Irritated by these criticisms and particularly by this author’s review
article (White, 1983), 16 Geertz responded in kind, dismissing the critics as
having failed to see what the book was about; failing to see the involution
thesis in its relation to his other work, and approaching the study of rural
Javanese society with the wrong theoretical and methodological baggage,
but still leaving readers feeling that he had side-stepped the main points of
criticism (Geertz, 1984).
   Peddlers and Princes, also published in 1963, pursued a parallel search
for an emerging middle class on the urban side, by comparing small-town

15. Geertz never attempted a more detailed analysis of involutionary change in Javanese culture
    generally, although he had intended to do so: ‘The one thing I do regret about Agricultural
    Involution is that I didn’t, as I had originally planned, connect up my ecological argument
    with a general analysis of Javanese culture, but I just felt at the time that if I tried to do that
    I would be writing the damn thing for a quarter of a century’ (Geertz, letter to the author,
    15 April 1983).
16. The review did strain the bounds of academic decorum by making indirect reference to
    Geertz’s work on Indonesia as ‘imperialist software’ (White, 1983: 30, citing Wertheim,
    1973 and Utrecht, 1973).

Legacies: Clifford Geertz                                                 1195

entrepreneurial practices in Mojokuto and Tabanan (Bali). It concludes with
six propositions on ‘pre-take-off social change’, all of them about the dynam-
ics of ‘innovative economic leadership (entrepreneurship)’ (Geertz, 1963b:
147–53). A third book published that year rounded off Geertz’s early con-
tributions to modernization theory, by turning his attention to Third World
politics. In Old Societies and New States: the Quest for Modernity in Asia
and Africa, Geertz’s much-cited essay ‘The Integrative Revolution: Primor-
dial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States’ adopts Shils’s (1957)
notion of ‘primordial ties’ based on (assumed) ties of kin, race, language,
region, religion or custom. The conflict between ‘primordial’ and ‘civil’ sen-
timents threatens governments and nations and requires, in Geertz’s view, an
‘integrative revolution’ led by modernizing élites to defuse, dismantle or at
least to ‘domesticate’ primordial sentiments and reduce them to civil order
(Geertz, 1963d). This general schema was the subject of much debate among
political scientists, following an early critique by Doornbos (1972); further
critique of these notions as applied to Indonesian political dynamics was to
follow in the 1980s and 1990s.

CULTURE, ETHNOGRAPHY AND THE INTERPRETIVE TURN

In all his early work Geertz was preoccupied, like his teachers and mentors
at Harvard, MIT and Chicago, with the problems of modernization. Agri-
cultural Involution, Peddlers and Princes and ‘the integrative revolution’ all
make frequent reference to the modernization theories of Parsons, Rostow
and Shils. While firmly wedded to their ideas on development, Geertz was
increasingly uncomfortable with their positivistic approach to social science
epistemology and method and it was inevitable that he would make an ex-
plicit break with this tradition. His Cambridge and Chicago years also saw
the emergence of fierce debates on the concept of culture. In the 1960s, as
the younger generation tried to make sense of Marxism and Levi-Straussian
structuralism, North American anthropology became the site of polarized
struggles and stand-offs between the advocates of a (positivist, materialist)
‘science of culture’ (Harris, 1968, 1979) on the one hand, in which human af-
fairs are essentially ‘caused by the ways human beings cope with nature’ and
on the other a more humanistic, ‘mentalist’, qualitative approach which saw
‘humankind as spinning ever more complex webs of signification through
autonomous processes of the symbolic faculty’ (Wolf, 1984a: 148). All of
Geertz’s publications of the 1960s show a clear alignment with the ‘symbolic’
approach, although he preferred to give his version of it another name.
   Once at Princeton — ‘that island of upmarket composure’ (Geertz, 2000c:
53) — and secure in his reputation, Geertz finally freed himself from his
uneasy relationship with the modernization theorists, threw down the gauntlet
against the functionalist and positivist science represented by his Harvard and
Chicago mentors, and argued eloquently, forcefully and often for what he

1196                                                                         Ben White

called ‘interpretive anthropology’. The Interpretation of Cultures (Geertz,
1973) is a collection of twelve essays published between 1957 and 1972.
While some of these essays already appeared outdated, the book’s great and
lasting impact — which makes it figure in various lists of the twentieth
century’s greatest books — came from its introductory and closing essays.
In ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, Geertz
attacked eclectic notions of culture — singling out his mentor Kluckhohn’s
work as an example of the ‘conceptual morass’ which they reflect (Geertz,
1973: 4–5) 17 — and proclaimed a narrowed, semiotic concept of culture,
encapsulated in the ever-quoted passage: ‘Believing, with Max Weber, that
man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I
take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it not to be an experimental
science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning’ (ibid.:
5).
   If culture is webs of meaning, what then is ethnography, the anthropolo-
gist’s practice of studying it? To explain this, Geertz invoked Gilbert Ryle’s
distinction between a ‘twitch’ and a ‘wink’, and ‘a not untypical excerpt from
my own field journal’: a Moroccan tale of murder, robbery and kidnapping
involving a tribal sheikh, the Jew Cohen, the local commandant Captain Du-
mari, herds of sheep and various other characters. What ethnographers do
is what Ryle called ‘thick description’: ‘sorting out the structures of signi-
fication . . . and determining their social ground and import’, the result of
which he calls, reflexively, ‘our constructions of other people’s constructions
of what they and their compatriots are up to’ (ibid.: 9). Doing ethnography,
he wrote, ‘is like trying to read (in the sense of “trying to construct a reading
of”) a manuscript’ (ibid.: 10).
   The closing essay, ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight’, exempli-
fies the new paradigm of how to study culture. It begins again with a fieldwork
story, but this time one which gets the writer directly into the action. When in
1958 the Geertzes moved into a Balinese village, their initial efforts to build
‘rapport’ were met with studied indifference: people ‘acted as if we simply
did not exist’. Everything changed after some days when the police raided
an illegal cockfight they were attending, and they ran away with the other
villagers. When the police marched into the compound in which they had
taken refuge and demanded to know what they were doing there: ‘our host
of some minutes leaped instantly to our defence, producing an impassioned
description of who and what we were, so detailed and so accurate that it was
my turn, having barely communicated with a living human being save my
landlord and the village chief for more than a week, to be astonished’ (ibid.:
412–15). This anecdote actually has little relevance to the intricate analysis
of Balinese cockfighting and its interpretive function which follows, but this
does not seem to have bothered readers; the rhetorical technique has since

17. The reference is to Kluckhohn’s (1949) Mirror for Man, which defined culture in eleven
    different ways in the space of a few pages.

Legacies: Clifford Geertz                                                                         1197

become ‘a major (and now perhaps, dully repetitive) strategy of both writing
and analysis in ethnographic, historical and literary scholarship’ (Marcus,
1999: 106).
  These two essays sent ‘a tidal wave across the disciplines’, by showing:

   how to take a piece of culture — a ritual, a tall tale, a performance, a symbol, or an event —
   and treat it as ‘text’ . . . Liberated from the rigours of explanation and able to take as a focal
   text any piece of the social world, great or small, historians . . . , literary critics . . . and even
   policy analysts . . . were freed to put culture centre-stage. (Swidler, 1996: 300).

Geertz thus located culture and ethnography squarely within the semiotic turn
in anthropology, and the general revival of intellectual interest in hermeneu-
tic (meaning-centred) approaches in many other disciplines. But he also
distanced himself implicitly from the more rarefied schools of symbolic and
cognitive anthropology, and structuralism, that treat culture as purely a sym-
bolic system, and thus ‘run the danger . . . of locking cultural analysis away
from its proper object, the informal logic of actual life’ (Geertz, 1973: 17). In
another equally well-quoted passage (later forgotten by many of his follow-
ers) he argues: ‘If anthropological interpretation is constructing a reading of
what happens, then to divorce it from what happens — from what, in this time
or that place, specific people say, what they do, what is done to them, and
from the whole business of the world — is to divorce it from its applications
and render it vacant’ (ibid.: 18).
   For the next decade, while the Indonesia specialists, irritated by his ap-
parent carelessness and disregard for evidence, engaged in a long season of
Geertz-bashing, Geertz himself emerged as north American anthropology’s
superstar (a position formerly occupied by Margaret Mead, who died in 1978)
and its chief ambassador to other disciplines, with major influence on the
other social sciences, literary studies, philosophy, and beyond (Sewell, 1999:
35).

THE ‘THEATRE STATE’ IN BALI

Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali (1980), Geertz’s most
important work on Bali, is the only one of his Indonesia books written after
he had abandoned modernization theory, although many of its main ideas had
been sketched out in earlier publications (Geertz, 1966a, 1977; Geertz and
Geertz, 1975). Negara is also the only one of Geertz’s works which makes
significant use of the work of Indonesian scholars. 18

18. While Geertz was revered among Indonesian scholars, he seems to have had a very low
    opinion of their work. In 1972, in an influential consultancy report for the Ford Foundation
    on the state of the social sciences in Indonesia, Geertz characterized Indonesian intellec-
    tual life as ‘centralised, over-organised, spasmodic, practical, and strongly influenced by
    economists’, and social science training as ‘bookish, speculative, and . . . philosophical or

1198                                                                                Ben White

  Like Agricultural Involution, Negara adopts a strategy of ‘doing history
backwards’ and is not mainly based on his village fieldwork, although that
has informed the chapters on kinship and irrigation organization. Available
(mainly Dutch) literature and retrospective interviews with elderly Balinese
are invoked to build a much broader thesis about the nature of the ‘classical’
Balinese state. The precolonial Balinese state, Geertz argued, contravened
Western theories of politics and power, being first and foremost concerned
with spectacle and symbolism, not as means to (political or economic) ends
but as ends in themselves:

  The expressive nature of the Balinese state was apparent through the whole of its known
  history, for it was always pointed not toward tyranny, whose systematic concentration of
  power it was incompetent to effect, and not even very methodically toward government,
  which it pursued indifferently and hesitantly, but rather toward spectacle, toward ceremony,
  toward the public dramatization of the ruling obsessions of Balinese culture: social inequality
  and status pride. It was a theatre state in which the kings and princes were the impresarios,
  the priests the directors, and the peasants the supporting cast, stage crew, and audience. . . .
  Power served pomp, not pomp power. (Geertz, 1980: 13)

   This bold vision required Geertz to make the heroic assumption that elderly
informants interviewed in the late 1950s could reliably recall conditions of
precolonial Bali, more than a half-century earlier, and also that no important
structural changes had occurred in Bali from the fifteenth century until the
Dutch conquest in 1906–8. It is thus actually a kind of ‘anti-history’, osten-
sibly situated in time but greatly underplaying historical change (Errington,
2007: 196). As with Agricultural Involution, subsequent detailed work by
various authors (in this case, with colonial archives and court manuscripts)
has eroded Geertz’s claim that Bali’s royal elites were not involved in precolo-
nial village rule, irrigation organization, taxation and the like. They suggest,
instead, that what Geertz saw as ‘classical’ Bali was, in fact, ‘the very result
of 20th century colonial policy and ideology’ (Schulte Nordholt, 1981: 474):

  Anthropologists like Geertz and [Stephen] Lansing have, for reasons of their own, overlooked
  the role of the king as a ruler . . . The kings were dispossessed of their power to manage and
  control irrigation, manpower, taxes, and adjudication by the bureaucratic colonial state . . .
  In sum, the kings were left with the roles that anthropologists have labeled the ‘theatre state’
  and the peasants with the ‘democratic irrigation model’. (Hauser-Schäublin, 2003: 170)

    even doctrinal’ (Geertz, 1974: 365, 369). Those who have worked in Indonesia during this
    period will recognize the truth of much of Geertz’s assessment. On the other hand, he seems
    to have retained from his Yogyakarta days twenty years previously the ‘pith-helmet’ view
    of Indonesian academics avoiding ‘real’ field research, in favour of ‘a brief “study trip” in
    search of written records, or an interview or two, a generalized summary of the accessible
    “literature” on the subject, or a fish-net type of fact-gathering survey’ (ibid.: 369). This
    sweeping dismissal did no justice to the pioneering village-level research of many Indone-
    sian academics and their students during the 1950s and 1960s, including path-breaking
    efforts at what is now called ‘participatory action research’ (White, 2005: 113–20), which
    Geertz does not appear to have read, never mentioning them in his own work.

Legacies: Clifford Geertz                                                                      1199

QUESTIONS ON GEERTZIAN INTERPRETIVISM

Paradoxically, the moment when history and other disciplines began to take
serious notice of Geertzian anthropology was precisely the moment when
anthropologists began to question it (Rabinow, 1986: 241–2). William Sewell,
a social historian, encapsulates the ‘edgy relationship’ between Geertz and
his anthropological colleagues:

   The positivists criticize Geertz for abandoning . . . scientific values in favour of the more
   ‘glamourous’ or ‘alluring’ qualities of interpretive method. The post-modernists, by contrast,
   reproach him for not pushing his interpretive method far enough — in particular, for failing to
   subject his own interpretive ethnographic practice to critical interpretation. The materialists,
   finally, criticize him for his neglect of history, power, and social conflict. (Sewell, 1999: 35–6)

   The years 1982–4 in particular saw a barrage of critique of many of the
key ideas on which Geertz had made his reputation, in the attacks on his
Balinese work (Roseberry, 1982), on agricultural involution in Java (sum-
marized in White, 1983), on his conceptions of religion (Asad, 1983) and
ideology (Wolf, 1984b), primordialism (Anderson, 1983) and on the inter-
pretive paradigm generally (Shankman, 1984). Geertz, however was, more
often than not, conspicuously absent from these and other debates surround-
ing his work, both in the 1980s and later. He declined to join an otherwise
balanced discussion of Shankman’s positivist critique in a Current Anthro-
pology debate: ‘the enigmatic silence of Clifford Geertz hovers over this
commentary like a cloud’ (Shankman, 1984: 276). When persuaded or pro-
voked to ‘join in the merriment’, as he once put it, his rejoinders to criticism
were acerbic — ‘this dog is mean, he bites when he is kicked’ 19 — and often
side-stepped the main points of criticism. 20 From the mid 1980s onwards his
writing, still prolific, was largely devoted to literary criticism and reflective
commentary: on the method and style of other anthropologists, review es-
says on a variety of themes aimed at a broad North American intelligentsia
in the New York Review of Books and The New Republic, and from the late
1980s onwards, a series of reflections on his own career in books (Geertz,
1995), essays (Geertz, 2000a, 2002), lectures (Geertz, 1999) and interviews
(Geertz, 1988b; Handler, 1991; Micheelsen 2002; Olson, 1991).

Culture, Politics and Social Change

Geertz argued that ideology (Geertz, 1964), religion (Geertz, 1966b), com-
mon sense (Geertz, 1975), art (Geertz, 1976), and many other aspects of

19. Geertz, letter to the author, 3 January 1985, referring to his (1984) response to critiques of
    Agricultural Involution.
20. See for example his response to critiques of The Theatre State (Geertz, 2003) and of his
    views on post-colonial and post-socialist states (Geertz, 2004).

1200                                                                  Ben White

social life and ideas are ‘cultural systems’, and (as we have seen) that cul-
ture itself is a general system of symbolic forms, to be understood in their
actual practice. But he never explained precisely what he thought ‘symbols’
are, what he really meant by ‘systems’ of symbols, or how they should be
analysed (Lieberson, 1984: 11); indeed he proclaimed, late in life: ‘I am an
ethnographer . . . from beginning to end; and I don’t do systems’ (Geertz,
2000a: x).
   On the Geertzian method, Elizabeth Colson noted in an early review that
Geertz ’s ethnography ‘does not provide a model for other anthropologists
or sociologists of lesser talent to follow since he proceeds from an intuitive
grasp of what is important and reaches his conclusion with a flourish that
conceals the tedium of the procedures’ (Colson, 1975: 637–8). A great deal of
debate around Geertzian interpretivism has centred around the lack of clear
criteria for evaluating alternative cultural interpretations, or ‘intuitive grasps
of what is important’. In the mid-1980s Geertz joined the debate by turning
his talents as a literary critic on to his own discipline, most notably in Works
and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (1988a). Taking selected works of
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Edward Evans-Pritchard, Bronislaw Malinowski and
Ruth Benedict, he exposed their distinctive styles of writing in ‘new criticism’
mode, and asked where lay their ‘capacity to persuade readers . . . that what
they are reading is an authentic account’ (Geertz, 1988a: 143). Arguing in this
and other writings that anthropology is ultimately a literary and ‘rhetorical’
vocation, Geertz came perilously close to arguing that the best interpretations
of culture and social life are simply the best-written ones, a position taken
up by various post-modernist authors and carried to extremes from which
he had to distance himself. Geertz thus provided fuel for the debate among
postmodernists around ethnography’s ‘double crisis’ of representation and
of legitimation (Brewer, 2000: Ch. 2; Clifford, 1988; Clifford and Marcus,
1986; Marcus and Fischer, 1986: 45–76).
   Despite Geertz’s warning against those varieties of hermeneutics which
divorce culture from ‘the whole business of the world’, this seems to have
been forgotten by many of his followers, who continue to neglect ‘issues
of power, interests, economics, and historical change . . . in favour of simply
portraying the native point of view as richly as possible’ (Marcus and Fischer,
1986: 77; cf. Hefner, 1990: xiii). This has led some scholars to question the
ability of interpretive frameworks ‘to explicate the things we most wish to
understand’ such as contemporary processes of domination, displacement,
marginality and violence (Steedly, 1999: 432).
   The fact that social historians, who are professionally concerned with ques-
tions of transformation over time, should have been so strongly influenced by
Geertz’s ‘insistently synchronic’ work, is something of a paradox. Geertz’s
cultural systems do appear somewhat impervious to change, but the Geertzian
approach did open the door to modes of historical enquiry and exegesis based
on ‘thick description’, at a time when ‘social’ history was gaining in popu-
larity. If historians want to combine this with diachronic analysis, however,

Legacies: Clifford Geertz                                                              1201

they need to adopt a different theory of culture than Geertz’s, focusing not
on the assumed unity of cultural systems but on multivocality and inter-
nal differentiation as sources of change (Sewell, 1999). Both historians and
anthropologists have argued that Geertz’s vision of cultures as systems of
shared symbols (and associated practices) blinded him to questions of social
differentiation, social conflict, and associated negotiations and contestations
over meanings. Who in society gets to spin the ‘webs of significance’, and
who gets caught in the web? These questions bring us into areas of enquiry
which ‘thick description’ cannot so easily reach, and raise questions about
Geertz’s approach to politics.
    In general, Geertz appeared indifferent to the trend to place issues of power
and history more centrally in anthropology, 21 as reflected in Roseberry’s
(1982) critique of his work on Bali and Asad’s (1983) critique of his approach
to religion. Geertz’s own political stance was more or less that of the liberal
North American humanist; he rarely took public stands or joined campaigns:
‘my own general ideological position is largely the same as that of Aron,
Shils, Parsons and so forth; . . . I am in agreement with their plea for a civil,
temperate, unheroic politics’ (Geertz, 1973: 200)
    Geertz’s avoidance of any serious discussion of the Indonesian mass mur-
ders of 1965–6, and what they mean for our understanding of Indonesian
politics, is both puzzling and revealing. The bulk of the killings occurred in
Geertz’s two fieldwork regions of Central/East Java and Bali. Some weeks
after the crushing of a bungled leftist coup attempt in Jakarta (which killed
twelve persons in total), an orchestrated anti-Communist backlash resulted
in the massacre of hundreds of thousands by the army and army-trained
militias. In the years that followed Geertz alluded only in passing to the
killings, ‘with a weary resignation, in which striking insights are encom-
passed in turns of phrase full of the kind of detachment and wryness that
has angered his younger critics’ (Marcus, 1999: 107, fn 15). In a 1973
postscript to his (pre-1965) article on primordialism, Geertz described the
killings as having been done ‘in Java at least, mainly along . . . primor-
dial lines — pious Moslems killing Indic syncretists’ (Geertz, 1973: 282).
On Bali, where the killing was relatively more severe than in any other re-
gion, Geertz wrote in the landmark ‘cockfight’ article: ‘if one looks at Bali
. . . also through the medium of its cockfights, the fact that the massacre
occurred seems, if no less appalling, less like a contradiction to the laws
of nature’ (ibid.: 452). Such ‘cultural’ accounts of the massacres became
untenable as the years passed and more became known: ‘it is clear that
the military bears the largest share of responsibility and the killings repre-
sented bureaucratic, planned violence rather than popular, spontaneous vi-
olence’ (Roosa, 2006: 28). On Bali, Geoffrey Robinson’s historical account
of political conflict along class, caste and ideological lines offers a powerful

21. A key mover in this trend was Eric Wolf (1923–99), Geertz’s near-contemporary and another
    GI Bill beneficiary (Wolf, 1982, 1999; see Gledhill, 2005)

1202                                                                       Ben White

counterpoint to aliran- and ‘primordiality’-centred views (Robinson, 1995;
Sidel, 1997).
   Three decades later, in After the Fact, Geertz describes the massacres in
and around Mojokuto, mainly through a two-page excerpt from the 1971
account of a retired Nationalist Party leader: ‘In the beginning, things could
have gone either way. Each side was trying to kill the other side first, and when
the Communists saw that the Muslims had the upper hand, they just gave up’
(Geertz, 1995: 10). In relaying the old nationalist’s account without critical
comment — the only version that Indonesians were permitted to parrot under
the new regime — Geertz appears virtually to endorse the official view of
the Indonesian army and the CIA, that the slaughter of Communists was
a matter of self-defence and therefore justified (Reyna, 1998). Accounts of
such contested matters require the ethnographer to be more than ventriloquist,
to go beyond ‘Joyo-on-the-corner’ modes of exposition, and to have a point
of view.

Dancing with Words

By his own account Geertz wrote all his work by hand, very slowly — ‘about
a paragraph a day’ — and never wrote drafts: ‘I write from the beginning
to the end, and when it’s finished it’s done . . . I would not advise that other
people write this way’ (in Olson, 1991: 5). The result is a unique, dense prose:
erudite, meandering, seductive, often playful and self-deprecating, difficult
to ignore: ‘Almost everyone initially gets side-tracked by the visibility and
distinctiveness of Geertz’s writing style, which is like Cyrano de Bergerac’s
nose. It is conspicuous, it is spectacular, but . . . it is best just to ignore it, for
the sake of getting on with a discussion of his ideas’ (Shweder, 2005: 2).
   From about the mid-1970s onwards, when Geertz was more or less fin-
ished with fieldwork and became a full-blown essayist, something seemed
to happen to his writing style as the self-conscious flourishes threatened to
take over the substance (Anderson, 1995: 20). Local Knowledge, the second
volume of essays written between 1974 and 1982 (Geertz, 1983), did not
develop his central position on culture and ‘interpretive anthropology’ but
consisted mostly of general reflections on dissimilar topics, in prose which,
‘for all its irreverence and occasional brilliance, is too often digressive and
clotted with metaphor, tending to a self-conscious virtuosity that is at first
immensely attractive but in the end forced and almost oppressive. Drugged
into a kind of exhilaration by his racing sentences . . . one sooner or later
realizes that one has no clear idea of his view’ (Lieberson, 1984: 11).
   A few years later Works and Lives (Geertz, 1988a) provoked Edmund
Leach to vent his irritation at Geertz’s habit of tacking long, comma-riddled
lists (of names, places, events, schools of thought) on to every point: ‘every
point of argument is reinforced as if it needed to be supported by a the-
saurus. The resulting garrulity quickly becomes intolerable’ (Leach, 1989:

Legacies: Clifford Geertz                                                                 1203

139). Many younger readers, however, were simply captivated by Geertz’s
style. It is hardly fair to blame Geertz (or Foucault, or other authors with dis-
tinctive writing styles) for those who try, with less success, to imitate them,
but the ‘new fashion of incomprehensible writings by less talented followers’
(Schulte Nordholt, 2007: 34) is one of his less fortunate legacies. 22 In 2002,
at a special session of the American Anthropological Association honouring
his life and work, Geertz responded to various good-natured jibes about his
‘shaggy sentences, list-laden discursivity, and prozy maze’. He took explicit
issue with Shweder’s recommendation to separate the style from the ideas:
‘Having toiled over [my style] for many years, I am quite aware of its defi-
ciencies . . . I . . . question whether style and substance are so easily separable
. . . I do think that much of what I have to say inheres in how I say it . . .’,
and added some advice to younger anthropologists: ‘It pays, really pays, in
hard, tenurable cash . . . to be readable. Better over the top than under the
pile’ (Geertz, 2005: 109, 112)

A COMPLEX LEGACY

Despite his skills in ethnographic field work, Geertz was an awkward and
somewhat reclusive person, and many found his erudition and encyclopaedic
knowledge intimidating, although he got on well with students, preferring
to teach undergraduates. Certainly not a born teacher, he could also inspire,
as recalled by Robert Darnton who taught a Princeton undergraduate course
with him for many years:

   He talked too fast and mumbled into his beard so badly that the students found it difficult
   to understand him . . . The rumpled, disheveled figure at the far end of the table frequently
   said nothing, apparently lost in its own thoughts. Then suddenly it would explode in talk. The
   words would tumble out in a torrent, and we would sit back amazed . . . When his eyes lit up,
   and the words poured out, he infected students with the excitement of the chase. (Darnton,
   2007: 32–3)

The excitement which Geertz’s work provoked, and his greatest legacy, lie
not so much in research ‘findings’ as in his vision of culture and ethnography,
and in the evocative power of his writing. For four decades, he kept Indonesia
specialists and anthropologists inspired and irritated in equal measure by his
research, and a much wider group of intellectuals inspired by his vision: for
many social scientists Geertz literally ‘changed the way we study culture’
(Swidler, 1996: 299).
  Geertz’s legacy is not straightforward; it ‘endures by way of, and through,
the critique that succeeded him’ (Marcus, 2001: 167). His polemical stands
for interpretation against ‘explanation’, for description against theory, and

22. This problem peaks in the tortured, manneristic prose of Fred Inglis, Geertz’s sycophantic
    intellectual biographer in the ‘Key Contemporary Thinkers’ series (Inglis, 2000).

1204                                                                             Ben White

against all general theory, were important at the time, to make the point.
But they are now largely red herrings (Swidler, 1996: 302). To express these
contrasts in ‘either/or’ terms is to misunderstand the nature of both the nat-
ural sciences and of the humanities. Hermeneutics is not the only legitimate
approach to social analysis; good anthropological (and sociological, and his-
torical) research combines and feeds on the dynamic tensions between partic-
ularistic ‘thick descriptions’ and comparative enquiry into larger realities, 23
and it is the engagement of general theory and localized research that makes
anthropology a ‘discipline’ (Hefner, 1990: xii): the most humanistic of the
sciences, and the most scientific of the humanities.

REFERENCES

(For a complete bibliography of Geertz’s works, and other biographical material with links
to archives and video interviews, see the HyperGeertz   C WorldCatalogue, available at

http://hypergeertz.jku.at)

Anderson, Benedict O’G. (1983) ‘Old State, New Society: Indonesia’s New Order in Comparative
    Historical Perspective’, The Journal of Asian Studies 42(3): 477–96.
Anderson, Benedict O’G. (1995) ‘Djojo on the Corner’, London Review of Books 24 August:
    19–20.
Apter, David (2007) ‘On Clifford Geertz’, Daedalus 136(3): 111–13.
Asad, Talal (1983) ‘Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on Geertz’, Man:
    Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18(2): 237–59.
Bachtiar, Harsja W. (1973) ‘The Religion of Java: A Commentary’, Majalah Ilmu-Ilmu Sastra
    Indonesia 5(1): 85–118.
Branch, T. (2007) ‘Justice for Warriors’, The New York Review of Books 54(6): 40–3.
Brewer, John (2000) Ethnography. Buckingham: Open University Press.
Brown, Colin (1997) Economic Change in Southeast Asia, c. 1830–1980. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford
    University Press.
Burawoy, Michael (1998) ‘The Extended Case Method’, Sociological Theory 16(1): 4–33.
Burawoy, Michael et al. (1991) Ethnography Unbound: Power and Resistance in the Modern
    Metropolis. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Burawoy, Michael et al. (2000) Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections and Imaginations in
    a Postmodern World. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Clifford, James (1988) The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Clifford, James and George Marcus (1986) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnog-
    raphy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press
Colson, Elizabeth (1975) ‘Review of Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures’, Contemporary
    Sociology 4(6): 637–8.
Cruikshank, Robert B. (1972) ‘Abangan, santri and prijaji: A Critique’, Journal of Southeast
    Asian Studies 3(1): 39–43.
Darnton, Robert (2007) ‘On Clifford Geertz: Field Notes from the Classroom’, New York Review
    of Books 54(1): 32–3.
Doornbos, Martin (1972) ‘Some Conceptual Problems Concerning Ethnicity in Integration Anal-
    ysis’, Civilizations 22(2): 263–83.

23. As argued powerfully, and practised, by Eric Wolf (see note 22) and Michael Burawoy (1998;
    also Burawoy et al. 1991 and 2000).